This month I’ve taken a look at what spam can cost a small business in lost productivity each year, as well as how little it costs the spammer to make millions of dollars in that same year.  Most people would agree that letting spammers cost you money while they rake in millions in profits is not a situation that should be allowed to continue, but perhaps some of you are still thinking that spam prevention is simply too costly.

The major anti-spam companies all agree that the average volume of spam travelling around the internet amounts to about 90% of total email traffic.  This means that for every one email you receive another nine spam emails were sent by a spammer somewhere.

How does email volume affect hardware costs?

If those nine emails arrive at your business they need to be processed by your email server and stored in the email database.  What does this mean for hardware costs?Legitimate business email is more predictable than spam in terms of expected volumes.  A solution architect can plan a server configuration based on the usage patterns of your email users.  When you add spam into the mix it becomes very difficult to plan to meet that capacity with adequate hardware resources.  As a real world example, a customer of mine once received such a massive and unexpected spike of incoming email that the additional disk I/O caused two disks in a RAID5 array to fail simultaneously, leading to a loss of the data on the entire RAID5 array.

Let us say for example a business of 50 staff each receives on average 10 genuine emails from external senders each day.  If the 90% of global email traffic that is spam was not being blocked by the email server the users would be receiving a total of 5000 emails each day, only 500 of which are genuine.

The email servers now need to be scaled up to handle this 10x increase in load.  That means purchasing additional CPU cores and memory to process the increased email traffic.  It also means purchasing additional storage to handle the increased disk I/O caused by the 10x increase in email traffic, and the increased capacity to store the spam emails in the database.  In larger businesses it would also mean purchasing additional servers to load balance the traffic if it exceeded the scalable limits of single servers.

More servers mean more rack space in data centres, more comms infrastructure, more power consumption, all of which adds to your costs.

Why spend more on hardware when you can spend less on spam prevention?

Taken on its own the hardware costs may not concern some businesses that are willing to just throw more servers at the problem.  However when you consider those additional hardware costs alongside the lost staff productivity, and then add to that the notion of spammers making millions while your business incurs massive costs, the benefits of an effective anti-spam solution become much more clearer.